Every business owner wants to increase conversions. Whether it's trying to get browsers in your street level clothing store to buy, or website visitors to add a product to their cart, we're all playing a game of converting browsers into buyers.

Naturally there are some browsers in your shop that are really quite serious and almost ready to buy. And there are also various degrees of browsers. I'm going to bunch all the browsing customers and call them Window Shoppers - ranging from completely uncommitted passers by to browsers in your shop tugging at a new sweater.

Recently I was in a store that I had no intention of buying anything from. As I walked through the store casting my eyes around, I started wondering:

How could this store's owner turn ME into a buyer?

Which leads me to a second thought. If I'm in your store I'm 1000 times more valuable than someone in the street, even if I have no intention of buying today. Why? Because you have my attention. It's your shop, your staff and your message. You should have a pretty good chance of converting me. Maybe not today, but one day. Buying decisions are often cumulative things.

But before we get too deep into this, let's try and get inside the head of a window shopper.

The Window Shopping Syndrome

While this would apply to both online and offline stores, I'm going to focus on ecommerce, or online stores. In this context, a window shopper is someone browsing your ecommerce store.

Window shoppers, the lovable little creatures that we are, share some similarities in the way they think. I've identified two things that are true of online window shoppers (By Brett's hand-waving theory of common sense and reasoning).

1. They're actually looking for a product they want that you have, but they're not ready to buy yet. This is sometimes called pre-shopping - finding out information and prices etc before the purchase.
2. They're interested in some information that you have, or just like to look at the latest widget thingy-ma-bob. They're a fan. In any case, they're not buying anything in particular, but you probably sell products or have information that they're generally interested in.

Thankfully when your shop is online your visitors are usually fairly targeted already. You're not so likely to get people wandering onto your website who are just waiting for their tardy friend.

So if that's what they're, how can we keep them happy? How can we convert these browsers into buyers - even though they're not really thinking of buying?

I think there's two things to accept up front:

• They probably won't buy today.
• They might buy in the future, but you can't be sure.

With that in mind, we've got to come up with ways so that they remember us when they DO want to buy.

3 Tactics to Increase Conversions: Recruit the Window Shoppers

Use Email Newsletters to Snag Future Customers

Have you got an email newsletter? Throughout your site, think about how you can prominently display your newsletter. Explicitly ask your website users to subscribe to your newsletter.

Use wording to incentivize the sign up - remember, you have to answer their inevitable question "why should I sign up? Phrases like "Sign up to receive updates on our products" are okay, but not as good as "sign up and receive discounts inside our monthly newsletter". Make sure you follow up on these promises though!

Give the Fans Even More Great Content

Search engines love content; so do fans. If you have reviews and comments on the latest iPod, it will be of interest to iPod fans. Write honest reviews of your products. Take photos and post them. Make videos showing you using the product or service if possible, and put them on YouTube. These things make your site a hub of information for people, and make you their top-of-mind store to buy their favorite widget from.

Build a Community

People like to hang out. They like to discuss and post their thoughts. Give your visitors a reason to stay! You can use Forums - why not link your forums to your products, so that people can discuss particular products? Or you could simply enable comments on your online store so that people can tell others what they think.

The 4Cs

Most of these ideas are easily derived out of the 4Cs framework - it's all about Content, Credibility, Conversion and Customer. Remember to keep what your customers are looking for right at the top of your list of priorities, and you'll be heading in the right direction.

GoodBarry proudly sponsors one of the biggest, and possibly the most star-studded web design conference of the year, An Event Apart. Doesn't matter if you're a web designer, front-end developer or a coder, if you care about web design, web standards, best practices and innovative ideas, this is THE event to attend.

Say hi to Barry and friends at the events listed below:

1. New Orleans – April 24 & 25
2. Boston – June 23 & 24
3. San Francisco – August 18 & 19
4. Chicago – October 13 & 14

PS. don't forget to pick up your GoodBarry Box of Tricks in the foyer.

GoodBarry is proud to announce that we will be sponsoring and attending the Future of Web Design conference in London this Thursday and Friday (17-18 April)! 

It's an excellent opportunity for the audience to get some insight into what this group of web-design experts think the latest trends in usability, interface design and business development are within our industry.

As sponsors, we'll have our GoodBarry stand in the foyer. Feel free to come and visit us. There'll be friendly GoodBarryites saying "Hi!" and giving away a useful "Box of Tricks" (Freebies!) which even contains a glossy storybook.

See you at FOWD on Friday!

GoodBarry will be attending and sponsoring the third BarCampSydney! We had such a great time last year, we had to come back for more while supporting the community. Myself and several of the GB team (including Larz, our designer) will be there on the day, and we'll be hoping to run a session or two while we're at it.

So, come along, support the Sydney tech community. You'll learn some cool stuff and meet some cool people.

BarCamp Details

BarCamp Sydney 3: 9am-5.30pm on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 April 2008 at The Roundhouse, UNSW.

Sign up to register for attendance here.

See you there!

A few weeks ago we entered a competition for Australian Startups called the Australian Startups Carnival. It's an interesting name, I know - but hey, who is a company named GoodBarry to judge? It sounded like fun (carnivals are always fun!) so we decided to enter. 

I'm not an expert in SEO, far from it. But this week I read a great (repeat, great) beginners document on SEO, and felt there were some great kernels of wisdom in there that are worth sharing in short form. The entire document I read can be found at SEOMoz. Those guys rock - thanks for a great document on SEO.

Background: What Is SEO

Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing your website so that your potential customers can more easily find you via search engines. Since search engines involve people typing in certain words to find relevant content, and search engines rank popular sites most highly, SEO is about

• The relevance of your content to the keywords that the searcher has entered
• The popularity of your site, often measured in links from other sites.
  

While the practice of SEO is still a little arcane, it seems there's definitely some core concepts that you can stick to reliably - and it's not all about keywords!

Links Matter. But Not Always.

Some think that SEO is all about volume of links to your site and keyword density on your pages. This isn't false, but it's not true either.

For example, not every link is worth the same. A link from a large, trustworthy site like CNN is worth a great deal. But links from known bad sites, such as link farms (where groups of people link to each other for the sake of building link volume) can actually lower your search ranking.

Apparently, links from sites or groups of sites that are considered "subject matter expert" pages by the search engines are worth a huge amount too.

Think About What Would Your Customers Want

Many things cited as SEO advantages are also advantages to your customers. Valid links, working tools, accessible HTML code, fast loading times, well structured navigation, easily found and focused content - they're all good for SEO.

This also all good stuff for your customers, and it helps with SEO for two reasons:

1. The search engines can find their way around, since the site is well structured and easy to navigate
   
2. People are more likely to link to your site if *GASP*... it is ACTUALLY useful and easy to use.
   

So if you try to make using your website a great experience for your visitors,  you'll find long term SEO benefits too - which is pretty cool, since it makes sense that good sites should be rewarded.

High Quality Is Key

Creating a high quality site that's worth visiting and linking to is a pretty big part of online success, and it's a strength for SEO too. From the quality of your web design to the quality of your content, it all matters. And not always because it matters directly to the search engines, but because it matters to people, and it is people that provide the links that the search engines pay attention to.

So those were three points that really struck me as interesting. Ultimately, it seems to me that SEO could be summed up in a sentence: "Build a really useful, high quality and easy to use site, and you'll get traffic from search engines." Naturally that's pretty simplistic, and it's a huge field and discipline that most business owners will probably need help in (read that guide, seriously).

There are also a number of technical concerns there, which you'll need to learn or get someone to look at. But technical stuff is easy. Creating high quality content is not - so which do you think you should start with?

Aside: We are an SEO Friendly System & CMS - Hooray!

On a final (geeky) note, I was pretty chuffed that with GoodBusiness we've got a lot of the SEO friendly features that SEOmoz.org mentions. For example, 301 redirects on the web page level for duplicate content is there. Friendly, human readable links for blog posts, products and catalogs - check! Google sitemap creation, yep! We've even totally covered the website metrics and analytics they recommend.

Excuse me while I go pat the team on the back =)

What's street cred? The urban dictionary of slang gives us this definition:

Street Cred
Short for street credibility (n) -
repsect(sic) from urban communities. usually something essential for making it big in the rap world.

Now if I may offer a definition of Net Cred:

Net Cred
Short for internet credibility (n) -
Respect from the online community, with tacit acknowledgement that the information or propositions you present online are real and somewhat trustworthy. Usually something essential for making it big online.

Unfortunately, Net Cred isn't really measurable - it's more a feeling people will get when they land on your website.

Think about this: when you're surfing the web, you're often looking for something. It might be a gift for your sister, some information for a project, or news on your favorite singer.

Sometimes you'll find something suitable, but then ask yourself: "Can I trust this website?"

That's when the website's Net Cred comes into play; the more apparent the site's Net Cred is the more likely you will buy the product, use the information or believe the news.

Zooming in on Online Businesses for a moment - for every business, there are some basic building blocks of Net Cred that can be (and should be) used pretty easily. If you are a business owner, here are some things you can add or do to your website to lend a basic level of Net Cred in the eyes of your visitors.

• Your physical office address. Real companies have real postal addresses - so tell people about it!
• A phone number. Your customers might not call it, but at least they know they can, if they want to.
• Watch your spelling and grammar. It's simple, but important. If someone has too many spelling mistakes and poor grammar it's too easy to be dismissed as amateur.
• Think about presentation. Your website should look good. It doesn't need to be a work of art, but spend some time, effort or money to ensure your site is well laid out and easy on the eyes. Either use a professionally designed template (as our online business builder does) or get a designer to put something together.
• Make sure your site displays nicely on all browsers. Too many sites only work on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), and not Firefox or Safari. Websites need to work across IE, Firefox and Safari for mac users - if your site doesn't display correctly to your potential customer, they will not buy from you.
• Add an About Us page. About us pages are commonly read by people trying to work out if they should trust a company. Make sure you have one! It should tell the prospect 5 important things about your company: who you are, where you are, what you do, why you do it and how you do it.

That's 6 things - and there's loads more, no doubt.

The point is simple: credibility is a huge question when your customers land on your website. You've got to make sure you are communicating your credibility effectively - or you'll lose them lickity split.